Literature

Photo of Marty Barrack

The literature of western civilization is an essential part of any young person’s education because it transmits to the next generation mankind’s accumulated experience and provides a body of shared experience through which we can communicate with one another.

Let us look at Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Catholic themes are its deepest themes. But even from a secular perspective, comfortable familiarity with the classics of English literature can help us communicate more effectively. If I describe a person as Hamlet-like, that single phrase suggests to anyone who knows the play that the person is well intentioned but lacks resolve. Our communications can become even richer if we both know the play well. Sometimes I’ll say to a friend, “Now, don’t get behind the arras.” Polonius hid behind an arras, a drape, to spy on Hamlet’s conversation. When Hamlet noticed the arras moving slightly and realized that someone was spying, he ran his sword through the arras, killing Polonius. The single phrase “don’t get behind the arras” evokes a rich variety of images, the garrulous Polonius, the momentary impulse of the indecisive Hamlet, the danger of receiving information we have no right to possess.

However, in colleges and universities all across America, multiculturalism has replaced western civilization. The central idea is that western civilization is no better than any of the other world civilizations. Any objective observer who looks at the United States, with its robust economic and legal systems, and then at the flyblown countries that populate most of Africa, will instantly recognize that the United States offers vastly greater human dignity, expressed in the freedom to worship God as we are called, to select a career occupation consistent with our needs, to live a healthy and satisfying life, etc. The liberal emphasis on multiculture actively seeks to suppress students’ knowledge of western civilization and instead to fill them with cultural ideas and assumptions deeply opposed to the ideas and assumptions that built our nation.

As an English major forty years ago, I read about 25 or Shakespeare’s 38 plays, as well as many of Milton’s poems including Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Today, an English major can graduate without ever having taken a course in Shakespeare or Milton! A writer’s race and sex count more than his literary skills. Toni Morrison, a black contemporary novelist, is read more often than Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson and Henry James combined. Zora Neale Hurston, who writes for the Harlem Literary Renaissance, is read more often than Mark Twain, Stephen Fielding, Edgar Allan Poe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift combined.

It will take a radical change in U.S. public policy on education to get there. It’s important only for Catholics who want their children to live in western civilization.